Detection of explosives or toxic chemicals remains an essential pan of protecting both military and civilian personnel both in the field and in controlled environments. With increased exposure to threats from improvised explosive devices and other homemade explosives, detection of trace amounts of explosive material in the field is essential. Current deployable explosive and toxic chemical sensing methods utilize ion mobility mass spectrometry, gas chromatograph mass spectrometry, X-ray imaging, Raman spectroscopy, and other such complex techniques. While these techniques are highly selective, each method has its own shortcomings, such as low resolution, competing ion, or molecule side reactions, response variation from different compositions of analytes, limited response range, and time-consumption. in addition, most of these techniques require bulky equipment and require significant training for proper utilization.
Despite remarkable improvements in detector technology, spectroscopic detection is still bulky and expensive, and requires significant training for interpretation of results, particularly in a many-analyte field environment, and colorimetric system field interpretation is subjective, and results are difficult to store for later review. More importantly, current colorimetric systems have no mechanism for determination of unknown chemicals that may also react with the detection material. As such, there is a need for improved materials, methods and devices for detection of analytes such as explosive materials in the field.